BY JEFF CHUDZINSKI
North Country This Week

CANTON — Congresswoman Elise Stefanik was in Canton on Aug. 24 to promote her Farm Bill at Greenwood Farm.

The congresswoman was joined by Assemblymen Ken Blankenbush, who sits on the agriculture committee in the assembly, and Scott Gray.

Numerous farmers from the North Country were in attendance, including potato farmers, maple operations and dairy farms.

According to Stefanik, her top priority with the Farm Bill is to ensure that New York farmers have a “seat at the highest levels.”

“New York is an agricultural powerhouse. We all know that. But I think a lot of times people across the country don’t realize that,” she said.

Stefanik noted this is the second Farm Bill she has worked on, with the first coming in 2018.

Though some “significant wins” were included in the previous bill in 2018, including the addition of the Dairy Margin Coverage Program, more work is required, she said.

That program, which helps bridge the gap for farmers during lean times, replaced the “disastrous MPP Program,” Stefanik said.

The Margin Protection Program was a voluntary risk management program authorized in the 2014 Farm Bill to provide dairy operations with risk management coverage at times when the price of milk or average cost of feed fell below certain levels.

“We still need to make some updates to the Dairy Margin Coverage Program to account for feed costs and input costs. So we want to work on continuing to improve that but it’s certainly better than the MPP Program,” Stefanik said.

Stefanik also touched on the inclusion of specialty crops in the bill, including maple and apple producers.

As part of the bill, Stefanik said she aims to include investments in those industries and hopes to ensure programs are funded in full.

Through the USDA, maple producers have various funding opportunities like the FSA Farm Storage Facility Loan Program, as well as conservation resources and recovery support like the RMA’s Whole-Farm Revenue Protection plan.

Despite the support for farm operations, Stefanik said it was an uphill battle on some fronts, saying state officials' overtime rules that were “jammed through Albany” could significantly impact a number of operations throughout the North Country.

According to Stefanik, a number of constituents have also raised numerous concerns with federal regulations and rule making that makes day to day operations more difficult and more expensive.

One attendee spoke to the new minimum wage regulations in New York State, which he said may be worse than the new overtime laws.

“They make it very difficult. A lot of us are under…where they’re limiting the production that we can produce and our expenses just keep going higher and higher. That’s not a win-win situation,” he said.

The wide ranging conversation also touched on the push to bring electric vehicles to the state, including in farming operations and the impact that solar projects have on farmers.

Jon Greenwood, owner of Greenwood farms and host of the event, said the push is simply not possible and is completely unrealistic.

“My real concern is the solar projects that are going in, especially up here in the North Country. It is taking land out of production that will probably never be put back,” Greenwood said.

“That’s putting pressure on neighboring farms because they can no longer use them,” he said.

With the need to implement new transmission lines to send the energy downstate, Greenwood said the move will only continue to remove prime farmland from circulation for area farmers.

Stefanik noted that some counties, including St. Lawrence County, have taken up the issue with solar arrays being placed on prime farmland.

Ray Dykeman, a dairy farmer with two dairy operations in Montgomery County, also raised concerns about the state removing whole milk and 2% milk from schools.

“We need to get the whole milk and the 2% milk back in schools,” Dykeman said.

Legislation has passed the House of Representatives to address the issue, Stefanik said.

Stefanik was also critical of New York City Major Eric Adams who made the initial push to remove whole milk and flavored milk from city schools, saying the move was poorly thought out and a huge detriment to the New York dairy trade.

“The other piece of that is going after some of these regulations that the Biden administration is putting into place that would limit flavored milk choices as well,” Stefanik said.

In many cases, children only receive dairy products through school, she said.

While domestic issues were a top priority during the hour-long discussion, Stefanik also pointed to foreign policies that are directly affecting farmers.

According to Stefanik, China has begun to purchase large swaths of farmland in a “stunning trend.”

“It puts our food security at risk, our national security at risk,” Stefanik said.

In response to the growing trend, Stefanik said she introduced a bill called the PASS Act that forces potential purchases by China to go through an extensive process to assess the potential impact a purchase may have on national security.

“That passed the Senate and we will pass it out of the House as well. So there are a lot of threats to our agricultural entities,” Stefanik said